What if plugging your electric car into a power point was not the fastest way of fully charging your car? What if you didn’t need heavy cables and big plugs to charge your electric car?
What if there was a way to have cordless charging so that all you had to do was park your car in your garage and the charging happened automatically?
Cordless charging for electric cars is not a fantasy … cordless charging for electric cars is here now … although only at the research stage and it’s being done by a group of companies that include Volvo, Bombardier Transportation and the European coach builder, Van Hool.
So how does cordless charging for electric cars work? The short explanation is that you simply place the car over a charging device and the charging starts automatically.
The longer explanation of cordless charging for electric cars is that the energy is transferred from the charging device to the vehicle’s battery via an electromagnetic field. This system needs two induction coils … one in the charging device and the other in the vehicle.
The coil in the charging device creates an alternating electromagnetic field that the coil in the vehicle picks up and converts back into electrical energy that charges the battery.
While this technology has already been used in a number of ways around the home it has not yet been used commercially to charge anything as big as the battery in an electric vehicle.
The research found that the test vehicle … a Volvo C30 Electric could be fully charged using the cordless technology in just 2.5 hours.
Although there is no common standard for this type of technology Volvo will continue with the research because they see cordless charging for electric cars as having great potential.
